Lately I have been getting thousands of mails requesting for a detailed tutorial on how to speed up a wordpress blog. Many starters still do not understand what CDN is all about, many new web masters have been asking tons of question which the most common one was “would I still need an hosting account (Host) if I get a CDN?)

Today I would explain more on what is a CDN and why you really need a CDN for your new wordpress blog.

Please note: CDN is something you can use on top of having a web hosting account because it basically helps speed up things on your website.

It doesn’t replace a web hosting account certainly you still need a hosting account to keep your website going. You can purchase an hosting account from namecheap,bluehost or godaddy just in case you haven’t purchased one yet for your new website.

Let’s go ahead with the basic:

What is CDN? Or should I say What is a CDN?

Today I would explain what CDN means –

CDN is a network of servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user; CDN is short for Content Delivery network. Still don’t get it? Confusing right? Smiles

When a user visits your wordpress blog they are automatically redirected to your web host server (e.g. namecheap.com). This web host server is located at the central location i.e. Lagos, Nigeria.

In other words every user on your blog is accessing this very server to view your website. Now if you have a high volume of traffic it can eventually overload your server which will certainly lead to a slow loading website or might even crash the server. That where a CDN comes in, CDN is a network of servers but these servers is spread throughout the universal.

. When using a CDN to power a website the static contents is cached and stored on all of these servers. Static contents are images, JavaScript, flash and lot more.

CDN technology redirects site visitors when visiting your website to the closest server to their location.

Just like I said earlier if your server Is hosted in Lagos, Nigeria and someone from Canada tried accessing it then they will be redirected to the closest server which may be in Canada.

This actually limits the number of internet hops needed to transmit the static files to your end user. User’s proximity to your web server has an impact on load time. With the help of CDN which automatically deploy your content across multiple geographically dispersed severs your website pages would load faster from users ends.

At this point the main question would be “Why I need a CDN for my wordpress blog”?

If you had taken out time to read the above section I mean if you didn’t skip it, you can clearly see having a working CDN linked to your website would certainly make a huge impact on your website.

These are some of the reasons why you need to use a CND and its impacts.

Crash Resistance: lately i have been receiving massive huge traffic from social media on some of my articles. If it wasn’t for the proper CDN and caching setup then my site would have crashed. CDN enables us to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having all traffic to our main sever thus making it less likely to crash.
Speed: the moment you start using a CDN on your site your site becomes faster.
Improved User Experience – when using CDN you’ll notice decline in bounce rate on your website. On my website I have seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. When your site is fast then it improves user experience
Improves SEO: one of the best ways to get your website ranking on Google is by making your website extremely fast and easy accessible. With CDN making your site fast and easily accessible ranking on Google can also be assured though you still need to optimize your content for SEO.
Currently I am using MaxCDN for my website and it has been really amazing.

Thanks for reading my article, if you have any questions kindly leave comments below.